Police arrest 'shadow IT' creep thanks to MSC Mobility

Sydney-based MSC Mobility has soft launched its new managed app service across "a number of law enforcement agencies in Australia" to address the problem of shadow IT creeping into the enterprise.

MSC is one of Australia's strongest players in mobile device management (MDM), managing roughly 80,000 enterprise end users. The company claims its new offering will address the governance and security risks of users downloading mobile apps.

"Mobile apps are taking enterprises by storm and the IT team are often caught out as business users bring apps ‘under the covers’ to the technical team to support,” said MSC's general manager of consulting, Justin Roche.

Roche told CRN that a number of police forces were currently utilising MSC's managed app service and he expected it would extend to "other safety-related agencies and federal [government]".

He said malware was "a non-issue" for MSC's enterprise mobility customers; instead risks come from things like free apps that access data on the device, perhaps harvesting contacts and call logs or accessing the camera and microphone.

Law enforcement was an obvious initial target market given the sensitivity of the data on the devices, added Roche.

Another problem is "fragmented business processes" as users deploy data across different apps. For instance, if an organisation runs Office 365, "maybe they should use OneNote not Evernote", said Roche.

What's under the hood?

MSC's managed app service is built around three components: the existing feature set of MDM partners such as Airwatch, MobileIron and BlackBerry; San Francisco-based vendor Appthority, which provides collection, analysis, and risk remediation of employee mobile apps; with the platforms wrapped up in MSC's service and support.

MSC has spent the past eight months working on integrating Airwatch and MobileIron into ServiceNow for IT service management, giving it "360 degree" visibility into customer environments.

End user IT departments are increasingly finding they must accommodate users bringing myriad mobile apps into the enterprise.

"It is past the point of central IT turning around and saying, 'No you can't do it', because people will just do it," said Roche.

However, there is still a "massive disconnect", said Roche.

The most common apps MSC Mobility sees among customers include note taking, enterprise file sharing and sync, sales and CRM and integrated field services.

Some organisations are more welcoming to BYOA policies than others, he added. "It is a mix. Universities, it's very common. Law enforcement, a lot less common. But as a general trend, it is something we are seeing more of. Central IT departments are realising they need to address it. End users aren't waiting."

Blanket bans on publicly available mobile apps are not the answer. "What is emerging is that enterprises are missing a big trick around productivity driven from micro/store apps," said Roche.

MSC general manager of product strategy Justin Stuckey said: "There is still a lot of confusion around mobile app strategy with organisations trying to work out the best mix of bespoke developed applications, app store (micro apps) and large platform vendor options many enterprises already have large investments in."

MSC Mobility was No.25 on the 2014 CRN Fast50, with growth of 36.3 percent to reach revenue of $10.3 million.